Weeks in Review

Stuff and nonsense for late February

This is a very up-and-down time of year for me, in terms of workload. I’m coming off a massively overscheduled week leading into the just-completed Board meeting, and this coming week is pretty light. But the next week I’m off to the APS March Meeting, which will be exhausting. Then it’s our brief spring break. Up, down, up, down…

Anyway, it’s been a few weeks and I’ve both written some stuff and opened a lot of tabs, so here’s a roundup post:

Me on Substack:

— Being Good Requires Being Better: Some thoughts about what it really means to be good at things that are fundamentally team activities.

— Capturing the Moment: Another try at defending against the common complaint that people taking pictures of things aren’t “in the moment” enough.

— Quick Hits: Academic Administration and the Super Bowl: Combining several things that wouldn’t make a full post on their own.

— Graduate Admissions Are Downstream of Faculty Hiring: Everything that’s wrong in academia comes back to the terrible faculty job market.

— Recent Weeks in Post-Cyberpunk: The Peripheral: A review of Amazon’s recent William Gibson adaptation.

Me Elsewhere:

— How to Throw a Football Spiral, by Jocelyn Solis-Moreira: I’m quoted in this, the latest in a series of articles where I’m interviewed about the physics of football, all thanks to a friend in the Communications office who talked me into doing a Deflategate piece back in the day.

Links Dump:

— I placed Stockfish (white) against ChatGPT (black). Here's how the game went. by megamaz on Reddit: Chaos, in a way that demonstrates the limits of LLMs.

—Three years on, Covid lab-leak theories aren’t going away. This is why by Phillip Ball: An unusually level-headed discussion of a topic that’s usually dominated by screaming freaks.

— These Deranged Rich Ladies Are Convenient for Explaining Why We're Leaving New York by Freddie deBoer: A very characteristically deBoer take on the “Leaving NYC” essay.

— DEI Is an Ideological Test by Graeme Wood: Never bet against academic bureaucracy.

— Why America Needs Football. Even Its Brutality. by Ethan Strauss: Not sure I’m entirely on board with this defense of football, but it’s a better than average attempt.

— Why you can’t trust the media by Matthew Yglesias: Similarly, not sure I fully endorse this, but the basic analysis is interesting.

— The Enduring Mystery of Friends by Freddie deBoer: The signature 90’s show is almost completely devoid of real cultural signifiers, which might be its secret strength. Maybe related to my theory of YA book protagonists, that I might elaborate elsewhere.

— Identity Politics vs. Identity Office Politics by Adam Kotsko: Throws “neoliberal” around a little more than I would like, but I think he’s hit on an important distinction.

— The Case for Hanging Out by Dan Kois: I organize a weekly informal happy hour for faculty and staff precisely for the kind of thing they talk about in this piece.

— It’s very weird to have a skull full of poison by Adam Mastroianni: A really nice bit of writing about mental illness.

— A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time by Andrew Hudson: These have come up a lot in my interviews about the early history of laser cooling, so running across this was a nice bit of synchronicity.

— Searching for New Physics with the Electron’s Magnetic Moment, by Saïda Guellati-Khelifa: The latest update in a long-running series of amazing experiments.

Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:

One of the perks(?) of being a faculty trustee is that I get to be part of the platform party for major college events, in this case the Founders Day celebration that happens every February. So I busted out my Harry Potter cosplay robes and marched in the academic procession then sat up on the stage through the speeches and performances. Apparently I could be seen in the livestream trying to count the portraits of past presidents of the college that are hanging in Memorial Chapel after they were mentioned in a speech.

The photo shows President David Harris giving an award to this year’s speaker, the author Andrea Barrett ‘74. Who, coincidentally, taught at Williams for a good number of years, which I think spans the time I was there. Synchronicity!

Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:

Not my usual line of music, but The Pip and I were talking about music in the car on the way to baseball practice, and he mentioned this record and the latest Denzel Curry album as the two best things he heard last year. So I fired them up on streaming in my office, which indirectly led to me briefly seeming really cool to a couple of students who came in for advising appointments.

I can recognize both of those albums as really good at being the thing that they are. Which continues to not be entirely my thing, but I can’t really deny that this is high quality.

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So, yeah, that’s a whole bunch of stuff. If you like any of this, and want more, here’s a button:

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